I’m an IT nerd but they could not pay me to buy a grill that requires software updates. What a bunch of nonsense.
Pay me? Fuck yes, I’ll rip that crap out and replace it with a couple of relays or maybe get fancy and arduino -> home assistant.
I’m betting that someone pay a LOT extra to get that garbage though.
Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.
I will never need a wifi connected kitchen appliance. A grill fits that category. My grill is a disposable item I buy one every four or five years.
None of my go to devices are internet connected. Not my TV screens. Not my toothbrush. My daily driver is a 2009 Toyota. Its great. No screens and easy to fix.
Just out of curiosity… What are you doing to your grill that you need a new one every few years? Mine is prob. 10 years old and still no reason in sight to replace it.
They shoot at it when the food is subpar.
As someone in the PNW, there is not much you can do if you don’t bring the dang thing indoors that won’t leave the thing a pile of rust in 5 years.
I am trying with a specific form of stainless to see if it makes a difference.
Nah, just give it the rattle can and paint it every now and then. “Once dor dust, twice for rust.”
I see, yes i also have a stainless steel one, which is outdoors all year. Good luck, i suspect you might have just solved your “grill consumption” :)
Have you tried ceramic? I don’t know if it makes sense but just a doubt
Someone will knock it over at some point within five years turning it into a sad jigsaw puzzle.
I’m an IT guy, if my printer made a noise I don’t recognise I’d shoot it.
I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It’s a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.
No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I’ve had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.
Gets up to 700 degs
That’s a furnace. Aluminium melts at 700 degrees. Gold at 1000.
I think they are using facism units
Yes, stupid empire units. You had me excited for a minute but I should have known that was absurd.
which minecraft mod is that?
Sending a temp updates to your phone so you don’t have to be standing near it the whole time is a nice feature.
It’s better to just purchase a temperature probe with wifi. Those are handy as hell.
My dad’s smoker is also able to set key frames so you can have it ramp up or down in temp at various points while cooking. And it can either be set to change temp at a time or when one of the probes reaches a certain temp. Plus he really likes being able to monitor it from his iPad, especially in the winter or if he has to run up to the store real quick.
I agree, but that should be a separate device. One that I can use in any grill or oven. There’s no reason for the grill itself to have that feature, especially if it can potentially brick the whole thing.
Sometimes I just need a device that can do what I want it to do. Obviously I don’t want a device that can be bricked, but that’s just a shitty programming, not a condemnation of the whole concept. I have a whole host of devices that never brick themselves, and I intend to get more.
Iirc, you can also control the temp, presumably by interacting with the pellet hopper or fan. This will be specific enough for a BBQ that an integrated component makes sense.
I can see the appeal. I’ve just had bad experiences with devices that use digital controls, and you necessarily need digital controls if you’re going to automate these things. Everything breaks eventually, but simpler devices can usually be easily fixed whereas anything that relies on specialized circuit boards are outside of my wheelhouse. I would be much more comfortable with owning one of these if they released information on how these circuits worked so that replacements can be made even if the company disappears.
Okay, I’m not a huge griller, but wouldn’t it be better just to build in a thermostat? Let it maintain its own temperature?
Commercial grills do exactly that. There’s just a thermostat built into the gas valve which uses a sensing bulb to modulate the gas flow based on actual temp and set temp. They don’t even need electricity let alone wifi.
Sometimes you need cook on different temperatures at different periods. Sometimes you want to set it to cool down or heat up and instead of waiting near it, you could just set the target and let your phone ding when it’s time.
Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)
What happens if the grill resets anyway? You get back to the default wallpaper?
Remember to update your grill and turn it off before Thanksgiving!
“Le Firmware? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
It’s a smoker with wireless controls
Instead of having to keep checking on it for several hours, an app on your phone will show the temperature and allow temperature adjustments online
OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.
For that and fear the company getting bored and pulling the plug on servers, leaving me with a paperweight, is why I didn’t get much into the IoT stuff.
One time I bought some under armor shoes with bluetooth. They would connect to my phone and an app would take measurements on my stride and angle of my foot in my runs. At some point they decided to make the app a subscription. They wanted a whole $15/mo! I decided to just run like a caveman instead.
I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.
On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump’s admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. “And where do you think they get their data?”
One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app
Damn these smart capitalists figured out how to get a weather satellite into space for that cheap? No wonder socialism failed/s
For real tho it reminds me of that joke about libertarians being like cats. Also $15/mo feels way to high for weather updates
It’s because of the reliance on hundreds of thousands of third party web dependencies that are constantly updating and constantly getting security patches (and introducing vulnerabilities)
Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.
Keep it Low & Slow!
BS. They update that expensive crap because it’s full of security holes.
You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no
You make some good points.
I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
My parents old farmer house had a smoke cabinet (wood chips heating). You put meat in, let it smoke and take smoked meat out, done. Though it makes a mess.
My point is, what do you need to monitor that for?
Depending on the internal temperature curve I may need to change cook temps in the pit, which I can do remotely. I also monitor the curve to determine when to spray and wrap, and other activities, depending on what is smoking.
Expensive options: thermoworks smoke-x
1-200 depending on 2 or 4 channel version, legally can only be used in the us and Canada because they use a custom rf protocol. As a result the range is 1.24 miles. Thermoworks is pricey shit but it lasts long, can be calibrated, and generally is one of the most accurate cooking thermometers you can buy
(albeit much much much more expensive than a $10-30 k type thermocouple and a used reader for $50 that is way more precise and usually will do data logging) also granted for most people a $20-40 thermometer would be fine with like 300-500ft range
My issue with “smart” anything is not the inherent concept, it’s the execution 99% of the time. I have plenty of smart stuff in my house but it’s almost never convergence devices. I’ve learned that these types of devices are more than anything designed to be disposable trash. Designed as cheap as possible, cut as many corners, introduce as many security holes as possible, etc. we have 0 consumer rights so even if it’s strong they’ll change the tos after the fact when their profits fall and they need to make the line go up.
So it comes to this. I’m not opposed to “smart” devices. They just have to occur in a dumb, roundabout way. They have to work without being connected to the internet, or in some rare cases by being bridged to the internet via home assistant from an isolated vlan. If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades. If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents? If I would then check open source and if nothing exists make it. It sucks but this where our garbage profit driven society led us, to shitty products that fill landfills and waste resources
Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.
If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades.
When I’m not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I’ll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don’t know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit’s traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.
Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.
I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.
I’m not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I’ve opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.
If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents?
Yes. I’m primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I’ve cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.
Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I’ve done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.
Just waiting for the day an evil hacker leaks someone’s smoker data to the neighborhood, exposing they cranked the smoker to 375° when they bragged about their brisket cooking 225° the whole time.
That sounds like the plot to an American Dad episode.
The perfect brisket heist.
ok but why aren’t you outside with a beer…pretty sure that’s a part of the meat smokers law
I mean that’s what I do when it’s something small, but when it’s something that takes 10+ hours, that’s a lot of beer and standing.
Though right now I just have an alarm to check it every half hour. Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I have a non digital charcoal kettle, and I found good options for blowers and temp control in China.
It’s a simple fitting that I only use doing very long cooks. Saves all the mucking around with the official stuff
Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I had the same thought and went with a HeaterMeter, although I haven’t finished building it yet.
Because I live in Texas and being outside in the summer for extended periods is dangerous.
Seems like we shouldn’t encourage people to live in locations where being outside for 6 months of the year is hazardous
Not everyone can live in California wine country.
Most people live where it gets either dangerously hot or dangerously cold for large portions of the year.
That’s pretty much everywhere
The problem is that this keeps changing
Not for a brisket though. I’m too old to stay up that long.
Funny enough that’s what I’m doing now, then my cousin leans over with his phone to show me his brisket is sitting right at 225
Some people also think the point of fishing is to catch fish and not to chill out by the bay with some light beers.
It can be both, but at least if i don’t catch any fish I’ll catch a good buzz
!ping
Fish in the area!ping
Fish on hook
Tap REEL to begin reeling!ping
Fish escaped
Tap CAST to try again
Idk I just simply wouldn’t buy the wifi grill
quick, hit the manual override before it’s too late 🖲️
I wonder how long it takes for the firmware update to take place. A few minutes? An hour?
I recognize the community I’m in rn. Just curious about how long it actually takes. I doubt it takes very long, or happens very often.
In a similar vein was the location of the charging port on the Apple mouse. Sure it seems asinine, but you only charge it like once a month, so it really isn’t an actual issue. It was just an excuse to hate on Apple products.
They could have made it possible for the user to choose when to update, for example after using it. Apple could have just stuck the port in front and let people charge while using the mouse. Both have no downsides
I’m not disagreeing, just pointing out that it is likely not as big of an issue as people make it.
In regards to your apple mouse example, surely it’s relevant to know how long the charging process is. The hangups I would have are when the interruption happens, how quickly is it resolved, similar to your points about the firmware on the grill.
If it takes 30 seconds to recharge to a point of usability, fine, no real harm. But if it takes 10-20 minutes to get to a usable state, then we have an issue.
A related scenario is if the Nintendo switch drains completely of battery; even plugging it into a dock and trying to play docked, you still have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to give it enough juice to boot back up.
Having used these mice, you can get through the day with like a 2-minute charge, then leave it overnight to cover the next few months.
A quick search suggests that a 2 minute charge will provide a few hours of use, while it takes about 2 hours to charge it fully. Whether that is acceptable or not is up to the user, of course. But to me that seems pretty reasonable. Though none of this really matters for me, as I don’t use mice.
I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
We’re starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors) but it had to wait until i’d built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house
That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
Oh shit, I didn’t know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
Haha have fun xD
I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, “That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!”
Perform Bad Apple using the most complex geometric shapes possible.
Ah hell yes. Fire 2.0 finally dropped.
Funny, they actually call the wireless features WiFire.
Man, FireWire was such a cool name for an interface.
You would think after ditching a bunch of rich fuckers on an island they wouldn’t get another chance to try that again.
This is just Fire. There will be no festivities. Just burning, man.
It is of the utmost importance that you understand I see what you did there.
the hazards of living in the burbclaves
What are the chances they shipped it on Thanksgiving vs Thanksgiving being the first time in a while the user turned it on?
This, but why does it need a firmware update and why couldn’t it be setup to update on shutdown rather then power on?
Why does it have firmware?
Removed by mod
Not to defend this practice but my guess is that the firmware was released before Thanksgiving, but the owner didn’t turn on the grill until Thanksgiving, which is when the grill picked up the firmware.
Guy is still an idiot for buying a device that REQUIRES Internet access.
Imagine a grill without the latest firewall
Thank you so much for that!😂
